A posting from Jonathan Robie announces the availability of 'QuiP, a W3C XQuery Prototype'. QuiP is Software AG's prototype implementation of XQuery, the W3C XML query language. "QuiP can be used either with text-based XML files or for queries against a Tamino database. QuiP is designed to make it easy to learn and use the XQuery language." QuiP is available on Windows 32 bit platforms, and requires a Java virtual machine version 1.3; it may be downloaded for free. "The QuiP distribution is a good way to get a hands-on grasp of the XQuery language: it conforms to the 7-June-2001 draft of XQuery, and it includes a large number of sample queries and data files, syntax diagrams in the online help, and a GUI. There is also a developer forum that you can use to post comments on the prototype or on the XQuery language; follow the link from the downloads page. In addition to the GUI tool, there is also a command-line version of QuiP. The script file RunQuip.cmd is an example that shows how the command-line interface can be used."

Limitations: "Not implemented are: (1) dereference symbol; (2) namespace functions etc.; (3) static type checking or any schema evaluation. In addition, the test for equality on nodes compares strings (this corresponds to the implementation in XPath). Other features are only partially implemented."

"Quip's XML parser and pretty printer are taken from the HaXml system from the University of York; see www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/HaXml/. They have been ported from Haskell to Clean, www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/. Quip version 1.3.1 has been written by Patrick Lehti (Java parts), Sven Eric Panitz (Clean parts), and Jürgen Kindler (nightly build)."